New Psy Ops Name Illustrates Dark Art’s Spin

NEUTRALIZING THE MESSAGE

New Psy Ops Name Illustrates Dark Art’s Spin

THE U.S. MILITARY BRASS IS PERFORMING A LITTLE PSY OPS on its own, changing the name of its psychological operations to Military Information Support Operations.

The change is intended to make the propaganda branches sound “less ominous,”’ but the new terminology is ticking off service personnel who practice the manipulative arts to benefit the U.S.

“I’m a psyop officer in afghanistan (sic) right now,” wrote Mindbender at Wired. “…By pigeon-holing us into ‘information,’ the new name is either an attempt to limit us to the misperceived notion of ‘leaflets’ and ‘loudspeaker’ (which is but a very small fraction of our full capability), or some Orwellian attempt at subterfuge.

Either way, I and my brothers want no part of it.”

And Psy Ops Historian Alfred Paddock wrote in Joint Force Quarterly: “Apparently, undermining the morale of the enemy is more politically incorrect than killing them.”

Psy Ops are intended to “induce or reinforce behavior favorable to U.S. objectives. They are an important part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic activities available to the U.S,” according to Wikipedia.

The practice is divided into three types of propaganda: “white,” “grey” and “black,” with the U.S. military performs much of the country’s “white propaganda,”’ such as mundane tasks like dropping pamphlets in foreign countries in which the U.S. is engaged in war.

But more covert operations are called “gray” — propaganda whose intent is to confuse, or “black” — the spreading of “false information…typically used to vilify, embarrass or misrepresent the enemy.”

An example of black propaganda would be when U.S. Army counterintelligence prepared a classified document in which it proposed destroying the online whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks, which it deemed a threat to its missions.

“The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site,”’ the classified document reads.

There’s an undercurrent of suspicious on the Internet that the U.S. carried out this mission when it arrested U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking a incendiary video showing U.S. servicemen gunning down Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters. Manning allegedly was turned in to U.S. authorities by convicted felon and hacker Adrian Lamo to whom the military analyst purportedly confessed the leaks.

WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video on April 5th. Manning was arrested in late May and is being held in military custody in Kuwait.